Category Archives: This Week In Reading

Hey. It’s Saturday. There’s not much to do. It’s not rainy in Boston but maybe when and where you’re reading this it. Let the world fade away as you devour the debut issue of Spectator and Spooks, a magazine some friends and I spent the past three months working on. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn good in my humble opinion.

I read 55 graphic novels this year, which averages out to about one a week. It didn’t look like that in practice though. I cleared out Emerson College’s (where I’m finishing up my MFA) library’s graphic novel section in the summer, as well as going through my roommates ample collection. Now I’m going through their horror movies.

Graphic novels got their own list this year because they read so much quicker than prose/poetry books. It felt like I was artificially inflating my book number by including them, and I decided against continuing that.

I want to read more by women next year, so if anyone has any recommendations I’d love to hear them. I’ve read Alison Bechdel’s books and am ever so slowly making my way through The Greatest of Marly’s by Lynda Barry, but I need more.

Egyptian Tales and Short Stories of the 1970s and 1980s Edited by W.M. Hutchins

At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom by Amy Hempel

What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Time and the Place by Naguib Mahfouz

The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

I Shall Not Be Moved by Maya Angelou

Enourmous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley

The Dog of the Marriage by Amy Hempel

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water Before I Diiie by Maya Angelou

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

Tumble Home by Amy Hempel

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flanney O’Connor

The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor

Blockade Billy by Stephen King

Project X by Jim Shepard

Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta

The Arabian Nights Entertainment by Anonymous, translated by Andrew Lang

For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

Transformations by Anne Sexton

Howl by Alan Ginsberg

Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve

Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O’Toole

Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Jacklight by Louise Erdrich

Zone One by Colson Whitehead

The Business of Fancydancing by Sherman Alexie

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Loteria by Cynthia Pelayo

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman

Meadowlands by Louise Gluck

Spiritual Development Through Astrology by Lynne Conant

Coyote V. Acme by Ian Frazier

Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King

I Too Dream America by Darlington Iheonunekwu Iheanacho Ndubuike

The Almost Moon by Alice Seabold

Brotherly Love by Dalton Giesick

Citizen by Claudia Rankine

A Manual on Exposure in Photography: Digital Photography Reflex and Compact Cameras by Ceriel van Arneman

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Sleep Donation by Karen Russel

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

Technically, this would be two less than last year, but I decided graphic novels should be their own list, so there’ll be a separate post with the 55 of those I read this year tomorrow.

I’m proud to say that I read as many books by women as men this year (actual, one more by women if we were to get technical). I try to read an equal amount by each gender in an effort to use the tiniest bit of power I have as a consumer to make the publishing world more equitable. I know it’s not much, but it’s the power I can exercise.

Next year I’m keeping the goal of reading as many books by women as I do by men, but I’m not setting any other reading goals. I don’t know where (of more terrifyingly if) I’ll be working, so I don’t know what a realistic goal is, and no interest in setting a goal I can’t meet due to work obligations.

What have you read this year that you recommend? Do you love/hate any of these and want to talk about them? Let me know in the comments!

Hey everyone. I know I’ve been off here for about a month, so rather than trying to catch up on all of the books I read in the between, I thought it would be better to post a list of the sixty-four books I read in 2014. If you want to discuss any of them, feel free to post in the comments!

1. 11/22/63 by Stephen King
2. Wouldn’t You Like to Know by Pamela Painter
3. Mystique: Ultimate Collection by Brian K. Vaughan, Jorge Lucas, Michael Ryan, Manuel Garcia
4. Unmentionables: Poems by Beth Ann Fennelly
5. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
6. Seminar in Short Fiction by Ladette Randolph (Anthology)
7. There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
8. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
9. Round House by Louise Erdrich
10. Speak of the Devil by Gilbert Hernandez
11. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
12. Maus I by Art Spiegleman
13. Maus II by Art Spiegleman
14. Colonizing Egypt by Timothy Mitchell
15. The Isle of Youth by Laura Van Den Berg
16. Fables, Vol. 1: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham and Lan Medina
17. La Perdida by Jessica Abel
18. Air, Vol. 1:Letters from Lost Countries by G. Willow Wilson and M. Kuhtlukhan Parker
19. Air, Vol. 2: Flying Machine by G. Willow Wilson and M. Kuhtlukhan Parker
20. An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
21. The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
22. The Doll’s House by Neil Gaiman, Steve Parkhouse, and Chris Bachalo
23. Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
24. Dream Country by Neil Gaiman, Kelly Jones, etc.
25. Lost at Sea by Brian Lee O’Malley
26. Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
27. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
28. Someone by Alice McDermott
29. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
30. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
31. Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury
32. Bossypants by Tina Fey
33. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me by Mindy Kaling
34. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
35. Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks
36. Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
37. The Realm of Last Chances by Steve Yarbrough
38. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
39. Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney
40. Getting Past No by William Ury
41. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
42. Blow Up by Julio Cortazar
43. Freaks Amour by Dana Marie Andre and Ande Parks
44. Old Rosa by Reinaldo Arenas
45. Cairo by G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Parker
46. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson
47. Sweet Diamond Dust by Rosario Ferre
48. Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
49. The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes
50. Who Killed Palomino Molero by Mario Vargas Llosa
51. I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro
52. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
53. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
54. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
55. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
56. Doctor Strange: The Oath by Brian K Vaughan and Marcos Martin
57. Undertow Volume One: Boatman’s Call by Steve Orlando and Artyom Trakhanov
58. Prophet, Vol. 1: Remission by Brandon Graham and Simon Roy
59. Mystic:The Tenh Apprentice by G. Willow Wilson and David Lopez
60. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
61. The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
62. Luisa in Realityland by Claribel Alegria
63. The Tomb of Dracula by Various Writers and Eugene Colan
64. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Last week, I got a little bit caught up in Thanksgiving travel and didn’t get a chance to pen one of these, or really do much reading. I ended up riding in a car, like a real people, thanks to my friend Dan. I did manage to read three books in the last two weeks though.

The first was Mystic: The Tenth Apprentice by G. Willow Wilson and David Lopez. It’s one of her earlier works, and it’s worth reading just to see how much she’s grown from there to Ms. Marvel. She’s really weaned herself off tropes like the special orphan that we see in Mystic. What stays the same through all of her work though is the humor and emotiothat she brings into all of her stories. She really is remarkable at capturing authentic characters, even in her earlier work.

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector was also funny, but not as worthwhile. It’s a work of metafiction, and in the interest of full disclosure I will say right out front that I generally dislike it. The essay is a great form, and when it comes time to espouse ideas about the nature of storytelling or politics (which is the other place I often see writers giving up on their story to address a particular idea) it works much better. The problem is that writers lose sight of their characters and artistic project when they try and shoehorn these kind of ideas into fiction. There are great exceptions, and what makes those books great is that they’ve transcended the rule, rather than followed it.

In eighty pages, Lispector spends thirty or so having the narrator tell us about his connection to the story despite having no involvement in the plot or relationships with the characters. There are some interesting ideas and funny moments, but this kind of meta-nonsense is not my kind of reading.

I also finished The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson. “The Lottery,” which ends the collection, is an amazing story. So is “The Intoxicated,” which starts the collection. The problem is the expanse of stories in between. Maybe story collections were different then (it’s been nearly fifty years since the collections was written), but twenty-four seems like too many stories to me, especially when it seemed like quality control was thrown out to fill an arbitrary amount of pages. While all of these stories are written with a great sense of rhythm and drip with the paranoia that Jackson infuses into all of her work, they often feel short of the mark because they aren’t ambitious enough. The stakes are often low for the characters, and hard to get through. My feeling after reading the collection is that Jackson’s talent better lent itself to novels than stories.

Next week, I’m working on Luisa in Realityland by Claribel Alegría, The Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson, and The Space Traveler by Ben Grossberg. That book has been taking me forever because I refuse to bring a book I plan to get signed on the train, and I really like Ben’s work and learned from him in college.

This was a comics heavy week for me, which means it was a good week. I haven’t talked about them much on here so far, but I love the comic book as a medium, and particularly I love superheroes. The idea that someone who comes by a superpower would use it defend other people is beautiful. Neither of the comics I read this week was a superhero comic though, so enough about that.

Undertow, Volume One: Boatman’s Call by Steven Orlando and Artyom Trakhanov is going to be the last volume that I read. The protagonist is a John Q. Marine type character who you can find in just about every first-person shooter ever made and the art style makes the characters hard to differentiate and the battles hard to decipher. I really like to know who is getting shot, rather than just seeing the bloody remains of the head. I don’t want to only say negative things though, because this is a pretty small book, and even if I don’t like the creator’s deserve some credit. There was a very funny and interesting side character, and they do a cool swap by making the sea the safe place for characters and the land where the characters cannot breathe.

The other comic I read, Prophet, Volume One: Remission by Brandon Graham and Simon Roy was much better. During the first issue, I was very worried that it was going to be another John Q. Marine book, but thankfully it turned out to be much cooler. The story is based around a group of clones, which explains the generic personality in a way that makes it acceptable, who are being awakened after years, maybe centuries of hibernation. All of the chapters in this volume are a different stand alone story of one of these John Prophets going on different mission. The reader slowly learns that the John Prohpets may not be the good guy they initially seem like, even if they’re the only traditional humanoid figure we’re seeing. It’s a cool book, and I recommend any comic or scifi fans pick it up.

As I mentioned last week, I also read a large chunk of stories of The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende for my Latin American Short Fiction class. The class itself has been a wash. The books aren’t the problem, it’s the way we’re studying them. An MFA in Fiction should be looking at everything through the lens of how can we learn from this writer and apply his or her craft to our work, but the class is about literary analysis, which is a fine pursuit and can be found in PhD programs in Fiction. What separates the MFA from the PhD as a degree is that the MFA doesn’t go into literary analysis, which is why I’m so frustrated with this class. Enough complaining. On to the stories!

I’ve read enough fairy tales for a lifetime. From my freshman year of college to maybe a year and a half ago, I loved reinterpretations of fairy tales and I read a lot of them, the originals too. I am, at this point, thoroughly sick of them and unimpressed. To be fair, Allende wrote her book in 1989, so she got in before the boom, so that’s on me for not reading her sooner. The book is older than me. The concept of a fairy tale with extremely real depictions of prostitution, rape, or other dark themes should be shocking, but it’s been done so many times. The last story in the collection, “And of Clay We Are Created” is an amazing straight realism story, and I might read more Allende because that story blew everything else in the collection out of the water.

Next week, I’ll be reading The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector and working on The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson. I’m slowly reading The Space Traveler by Benjamin Grossberg, which is a great poetry collection.

To quote the great wise man, Eric Matthews, “Well, hidey ho!” I had Tuesday off because of Veterans Day, and one of my classes randomly decided that this was a good week for no homework. I couldn’t agree more. It’s such a good idea that it should extend for the rest of the semester. Thanks to all this extra time, I ended up finishing five books this week. Time for a lightening round of This Week in Reading.

Roxane Gay’s essay collection Bad Feminist is the second of two amazing books she’s published this year, and it’s hard to say which one is better. Her novel An Untamed State is astounding and intelligent, but probably not as smart as Bad Feminist. They’re both rough books, but they’re taxing for a reason. Gay is fighting for the rights for the downtrodden. The books are hard at times not because she lacks skill, but because she’s so expertly turning the mirror on American society and culture and it’s not easy to stomach. Everyone should have to read Bad Feminist.

I also finished The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. This was another very good book. Jackson’s descriptions bring the house and it’s lopsided terror alive, making me feel as if I were there in this experiment in stupidity (“Let’s get a bunch of people who have been exposed to ghosts in the past and put them in the most haunted house that we can find. For science!”). It’s a fun, scary book. I’ll be reading more of Jackson soon.

Book number three was Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez. It’s hard to stress how good my week in reading was. The book is brilliant. If you haven’t read any García Márquez, this would be a good place to start. At 120 pages, it’s an easier hopping on point than One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is also a great book, but is crazy long. If you don’t believe me about Chronicle of a Death Foretold, ask the folks over at Nobel who gave it their prize. His attention to detail, and the way he textures even the smallest characters is what makes him so great.

My roommate Chris, who is doing an awesome short story a day project on twitter that you should check out (@CMPoolehall), lent me a copy of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender, which I read in two sittings. I’d been familiar with Bender as being the weird writer, and I’m really glad I finally read her first book. What’s really worth talking about is the way she evokes entire worlds with a single detail. Her stories work because of the economy she gets out every word.

The last one was Doctor Strange: The Oath by Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin. The opening was spectacular. Iron Fist and Araña make small talk in the waiting room of a doctor who specializes in superhero treatment, and I’d honestly have rather spent the entire graphic novel there. The story isn’t bad, but the frame is just more interesting. Imagine a whole comic book series where a doctor treats superheroes and they tell him or her their story. I would read that. Anyone would be crazy not to.

Next week, I will definitely not be reading this many books. I’m working on The Stories of Eva Luna by Isabel Allende for class, but I’m already disliking it. It’s translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, who also translated Sweet Diamond Dust so it may just be that I don’t like the way she translates work. (Correction: Margaret Sayers Peden actually translated The Old Gringo, not Sweet Diamond Dust. I was incorrect, and apologize). I’m still working on The Space Traveler by Benjamin Grossberg and will be starting The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson.